The Magic Frame: Choose Your Company

Like many of you may have done before, you would have gone on holiday with friends. When you go on holiday with friends, you choose your friends well.

There are friends with whom you can have a beer on a Friday. No, I should not have mentioned beer, as I am not allowed to have it more than once a month for a while. However, there are those with whom you can have a beer on a Friday.

There those with whom you can go on holiday. The two can mix, but not all the time.

There are friends with whom you can go on a holiday, and there are friends with whom you can go on a photography trip.

The two don’t often mix, as I learned from my own experiences.

I did go off for trips with a friend, and to save money, we would share a room. Sadly, he would stay up, watching TV till 2am, knowing that we would have to wake up at 4 am, to shoot the sunrise. On the last trip that we made, he was so tired towards the end, that he slept all the way back to Delhi, with me growling at the wheel. Growling impotently, I may add.

The point is very simple.

Going for a photography trip is quite different from going on a ‘holiday’, no matter what your partner might say. It is more like a working holiday.

It is important that you enjoy each other’s company, and it is equally important that you realise that you need to get out there, and photograph.

Another friend was only interested in eating all the local delicacies, and photography sometimes had to wait. In the end, I politely told him that he would have to eat alone, and I would meet him back at the hotel.

Unless the local foods are part of the agenda, and very often they should be, it is important not to make them the whole agenda. Unless, of course, that is what you want.

A wonderful trip that I made last year, was a solo car trip into the Central Part of India. This was real fun, and too short. However, given the fact that you can get into a bit of trouble if your car breaks down in the middle of the village areas, it is good to have a companion who does not flap his jaw in panic, and can be of good, practical help!

What I realised that, it is important to do a due diligence on your friends, and to make sure that you are aligned on the purpose of the trip, what you hope to achieve, and what you believe is a good balance between aimless fun and photographic fun.

If you don’t do this, then the possibility that you return with missed opportunities increases. The possibility that you will return with a foul mood increases.

I have birding friends who dash around finding birds. I am a birder and a photographer so I like finding the birds but want to hang around to photograph them. It doesn’t work. How I wish I had my own car.

It’s funny how I was eluding to the opposite in a recent post…that I need to put my camera down more often when I’m in the company of people, especially my husband, when I go somewhere. Like this trip to Carmel to visit my cousins. If I focused too much on taking pictures, I wouldn’t enjoy being with them because I sort of hyperfocus on my photography and forget what’s going on around me. It’s why I created my camera club and go out shooting myself mostly so that when I’m with friends and family, I give them my time. It’s so rare anyway lol.

You are too modest. You, like many of your fellow Countrymen ( and women ) have embraced the idea of Education and run with it. Sadly, Brits, having more opportunities than most ignore this and simply become more vacuous as times go on. I wonder where it will all end…..
( no wonder we lost the British Empire LOL)

Yeah… The problem that we have in India, is that rote is all that matters. Understanding the subject matter is not needed. The cut off, in the Grade 12 Board Exams, for college admissions, is sometimes as high as 98%. Ridiculous!
Recently interviewed an engineering college kid, a metallurgical engineering student, like I was. I asked him to explain the nickel-copper phase diagram, which is child’s play. He had no clue, despite the fact that he got over 90% in the subject. He claimed that he had studied it 1 year before the interview, and so had completely forgotten